Yep, that did the trick. Thanks! Changed to "NR >= $LINENUM" and it worked.
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bobinabottleNov 27 '09 at 18:59

Beware the side effects of using double quotes with awk in a shell script. $1, for example, means different things to the shell than to awk. Double quotes lets the shell expand it, single quotes do not. That's why you should use single quotes and variable passing as shown in my answer.
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Dennis WilliamsonNov 27 '09 at 19:34